They probably don't either. There are many levels at which something can be scalable. An algorithm can be scalable (to processing high numbers of items in a given time period) if it has a low Big-O score. A service can be scale vertically if you can get increased performance by adding more resources (cpu/memory/storage). Or horizontally if you can deploy more copies of the service to improve performance. An architecture can be scalable in some ways but not others. Usually the person has to tell you which performance goals are important to be able to judge whether or not something scales in a way that is meaningful to the problem.
They probably don't either. There are many levels at which something can be scalable. An algorithm can be scalable (to processing high numbers of items in a given time period) if it has a low Big-O score. A service can be scale vertically if you can get increased performance by adding more resources (cpu/memory/storage). Or horizontally if you can deploy more copies of the service to improve performance. An architecture can be scalable in some ways but not others. Usually the person has to tell you which performance goals are important to be able to judge whether or not something scales in a way that is meaningful to the problem.
ahhaha most definitely
@socratesdz : scalability is a little bit of a buzzword, as Kasey said, it really depends on the context